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TERRIFYING Bug-Sized LETHAL Drones Developed By U.S. Air Force: VIDEO

Drones uav mav | The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf points to a National
Geographic piece on the future of drone technology, including one
fascinating passage on how the U.S. Air Force is developing
"micro-drones" the size of tiny creatures, capable of flying through
major cities unnoticed.

The science writer, John Horgan,
described what information he was able to access from the government:
The Air Force has nonetheless already constructed a "micro-aviary" at
Wright-Patterson for flight-testing small drones. It's a cavernous
chamber—35 feet high and covering almost 4,000 square feet—with padded
walls. Micro-aviary researchers, much of whose work is classified,
decline to let me witness a flight test. But they do show me an animated
video starring micro-UAVs that resemble winged, multi-legged bugs. The
drones swarm through alleys, crawl across windowsills, and perch on
power lines. One of them sneaks up on a scowling man holding a gun and
shoots him in the head.

The Air Force describes these new "micro-air" weapons as "Unobtrusive, pervasive, lethal."

Yikes.

I
share Friedersdorf's sentiment that this video is "horrifying" — namely
because it signals that drone warfare is the next arms race.

According
to Horgan, however, the U.S. government "takes seriously" the potential
for widespread proliferation of "micro-drone" technology among
terrorists and governments: What, one might ask, will prevent terrorists
and criminals from getting their hands on some kind of lethal drone?
Although American officials rarely discuss the threat in public, they
take it seriously. [...] Exercises carried out by security agencies
suggest that defending against small drones would be difficult. Under a
program called Black Dart, a mini-drone two feet long tested defenses at
a military range. A video from its onboard camera shows a puff of smoke
in the distance, from which emerges a tiny dot that rapidly grows
larger before whizzing harmlessly past: That was a surface-to-air
missile missing its mark. In a second video an F-16 fighter plane races
past the drone without spotting it. The answer to the threat of drone
attacks, some engineers say, is more drones.

Oh, joy!

In
other words: another arms race to find the smallest possible drone that
can not only attack the enemy but defend against similarly undetectable
micro-drones. Rather than discourage this race to the bottom, we are
actively leading the charge.

Moreover, the development of these
fascinatingly small weapons provides yet another secretive weapon for
the military to use without any sort of oversight.

Yes, in a
world with micro-drones, casualties of American drone strikes will
likely decrease, given that we'd be directly killing targets rather than
obliterating them and everything around them with a missile from the
sky. But the possibility for such precisely targeted surveillance and
assassination, at the hands of a virtually-untraceable little "bug,"
gives our government one more tool to easily evade supervision and
accountability.